When Gov. Maura Healey signed this year’s state budget, she vetoed about $130 million in spending. Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House voted Wednesday to add back more than half of that money, calling it “absolutely necessary.”
State representatives rejected 15 of Healey’s budget vetoes, voting to spend $70 million more than the governor approved on areas including nursing homes, Trial Court staff, and reimbursements to local school districts for charter schools.
As they wrote and passed the budget, lawmakers said they were taking a cautious approach — while still boosting state spending — as they brace for the revenue impacts of federal law changes and grapple with funding cuts from Washington, D.C.
House budget chief Aaron Michlewitz said that despite what he called “the man-made fiscal turmoil facing the commonwealth,” state legislators stand by the spending plan they originally crafted.
“With revenue stable so far in this fiscal year, and with a large amount of money left on our balance sheet to anticipate future shocks to our system, we believe that we can afford to override the vetoes that are before you today,” Michlewitz, a Democrat from Boston’s North End, said on the House floor.
In a statement, Michlewitz said the House was focusing “only on funding that is absolutely necessary to ensure that critical needs can be met across Massachusetts.”
The Legislature can override the governor’s vetoes with a two-thirds vote in each branch. The House’s Wednesday votes send the overrides to the Senate for consideration.
The nursing home, charter school reimbursement and Trial Court administrative staff accounts make up the bulk of the money the House voted to spend on Wednesday, at more than $54 million combined.
Explaining her veto of nearly $20 million in charter school reimbursement money, Healey in July pointed to “historic fluctuations in enrollment” and said that her administration would monitor needs as the fiscal year progressed. She struck money from the Trial Court staff account to match her projections for necessary funding levels, and her nursing home veto removed $25 million to expand a workforce program.
The House also voted to restore $1.5 million in sewer rate relief funding, $5 million for shelter workforce assistance, and $1 million in regional economic development grants.
The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance called Healey’s vetoes “extremely modest” and said that overriding them could make a bad financial situation even worse for the state.
“Beacon Hill politicians spent the better part of a year warning about fiscal uncertainty from Washington, and now that those cuts have arrived, they’re ignoring their own warnings,” Paul Craney, the alliance’s executive director, said in a statement. “Instead of learning to live within our means, the Legislature is proving once again that its only solution to a budget problem is more spending.”
